CTV pop culture critic Richard Crouse reviews 'The Outpost,' 'White Lie,' 'A Perfect Plan,' and 'Helmut Newton: The Bad and The Beautiful.'
This image released by Screen Media shows Orlando Bloom in a scene from"The Outpost." The Battle of Kamdesh was a bloody 2009 confrontation that saw 400 Taliban fighters attack Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan, a station manned by 53 American soldiers and just days before it was to be shut down.
Director Rod Lurie, a West Point alum, class of 1984, with four years of military service, has made a you-are-there film. He immerses the viewer in the details, the lives, sacrifices and, ultimately the skill-under-pressure of these men as bullets and bombs fly. Set in Hamilton, Ontario, the story focuses on Katie , a university student diagnosed with terminal melanoma skin cancer. Trouble is, she isn’t sick. To create the illusion, she shaves her head, pretends to go to chemo treatments and takes pills that make her look unwell.
The film’s most impressive feat is in its treatment of Katie. She is, by all standards, duplicitous and manipulative, and yet Rohl’s sensitive performance humanizes the Machiavellian character without ever cutting her any slack. When Katie’s fears and past trauma are laid bare it reveals the possibility that she is driven by a force that she doesn’t completely understand.
It soon becomes clear that they are the pawns of Theo , the orchestrator of the situation who watches them on closed circuit cameras. The four strangers eventually figure out their mission, plan a perfect crime in just six hours or get blown to smithereens. “I don’t trust you,” Grayson says, “after all, we’re all criminals.” If they are to survive, they must combine their collective wits and abilities and work together.
His love—or is it obsession?—of the female form is roundly applauded in the film, as it was during his career, but in the #MeToo era photos of naked women with their faces obscured or reduced to an assortment of body parts, or wrapped in chains, don’t sit as well as they once did.
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